Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

  Just as a fleeting impression of competence can form the basis of a political vote, so Watson’s initial overwhelmingly positive assessment of Mary lays the foundation for further action that reinforces that initial view. His judgments from here on out will be influenced strongly by the effects of primacy—the persistent strength of first impressions.

  With his eyes shaded by a rosy glow, Watson is now much more likely to fall prey to the halo effect (if one element—here, physical appearance—strikes you as positive, you are likely to see the other elements as positive as well, and everything that doesn’t fit will easily—and subconsciously—be reasoned away). He will also be susceptible to the classic correspondence bias: everything negative about Mary will be seen as a result of external circumstances—stress, strain, bad luck, whatever it may be—and everything positive of her character. She will get credit for all that’s good, and the environment will shoulder blame for all that’s bad. Chance and luck? Not important. The knowledge that we are, as a general rule, extremely bad at making any sort of prediction about the future, be it for an event or a behavior? Likewise irrelevant to his judgment. In fact, unlike Holmes, he likely hasn’t even considered that possibility—or evaluated his own competence.

  All the while, Watson will likely remain completely unaware of the hoops through which his mind is jumping to maintain a coherent impression of Mary, to form a narrative based on discrete inputs that makes sense and tells an intuitively appealing story. And in a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, which could potentially have rather perverse consequences, his own behavior could prompt Mary to act in a way that seems to confirm his initial impression of her. Act toward Mary as if she were a beautiful saint, and she will likely respond to him with a saintly smile. Start off thinking that what you see is right; end by getting just what you’d expected. And all the while, you remain blissfully unaware that you’ve done anything other than remain perfectly rational and objective. It’s a perfect illusion of validity, and its impact is incredibly difficult to shake, even in circumstances where all logic is against it. (As an example, consider that interviewers tend to make up their minds about a candidate within the first few minutes—and sometimes less—of meeting them. And if the candidate’s subsequent behavior paints a different picture, they are still unlikely to alter their opinion—no matter how damning the evidence may be.)

  Let’s imagine that you need to decide on the suitability of a certain person—let’s call her Amy—as a potential teammate. Let me tell you a bit about Amy. First, she is intelligent and industrious.

  Stop right there. Chances are you are already thinking, Okay, yes, great, she would be a wonderful person to work with, intelligent and industrious are both things I’d love to see in a partner. But what if I was about to continue the statement with, “envious and stubborn”? No longer as good, right? But your initial bias will be remarkably powerful. You will be more likely to discount the latter characteristics and to weigh the former more heavily—all because of your initial intuition. Reverse the two, and the opposite happens; no amount of intelligence and industriousness can save someone who you saw initially as envious and stubborn.

  Or consider the following two descriptions of an individual.

  intelligent, skillful, industrious, warm, determined, practical, cautious

  intelligent, skillful, industrious, cold, determined, practical, cautious

  If you look at the two lists, you might notice that they are identical, save for one word: warm or cold. And yet, when study participants heard one of the two descriptions and were then asked to pick which of two traits best described the person (in a list of eighteen pairs from which they always had to choose one trait from each pair), the final impression that the two lists produced was markedly different. Subjects were more likely to find person one generous—and person two the opposite. Yes, you might say, but generosity is an inherent aspect of warmth. Isn’t it normal to make that judgment? Let’s assume that is the case. Yet participants went a step further in their judgment: they also rated person one in consistently more positive terms than person two, on traits that had nothing whatsoever to do with warmth. Not only did they find person one more sociable and popular (fair enough), but they were also far more likely to think him wise, happy, good natured, humorous, humane, good looking, altruistic, and imaginative.

  That’s the difference a single word can make: it can color your entire perception of a person, even if every other descriptive point remains the same. And that first impression will last, just as Watson’s captivation with Miss Morstan’s hair, eyes, and dress will continue to color his evaluation of her as a human being and his perception of what she is and is not capable of doing. We like being consistent and we don’t like being wrong. And so, our initial impressions tend to hold an outsized impact, no matter the evidence that may follow.

  What about Holmes? Once Mary leaves and Watson exclaims, “What a very attractive woman!” Holmes’s response is simple: “Is she? I did not observe.” And thereafter follows his admonition to be careful lest personal qualities overtake your judgment.

  Does Holmes mean, literally, that he did not observe? Quite the contrary. He observed all of the same physical details as did Watson, and likely far more to boot. What he didn’t do was make Watson’s judgment: that she is a very attractive woman. In that statement, Watson has gone from objective observation to subjective opinion, imbuing physical facts with emotional qualities. That is precisely what Holmes warns against. Holmes may even acknowledge the objective nature of her attractiveness (though if you’ll recall, Watson begins by saying that Mary’s has “neither regularity of feature nor beauty of complexion”), but he diregards the observation as irrelevant in almost the same breath as he perceives it.

  Holmes and Watson don’t just differ in the stuff of their attics—in one attic, the furniture acquired by a detective and self-proclaimed loner, who loves music and opera, pipe smoking and indoor target practice, esoteric works on chemistry and renaissance architecture; in the other, that of a war surgeon and self-proclaimed womanizer, who loves a hearty dinner and a pleasant evening out—but in the way their minds organize that furniture to begin with. Holmes knows the biases of his attic like the back of his hand, or the strings of his violin. He knows that if he focuses on a pleasant feeling, he will drop his guard. He knows that if he lets an incidental physical feature get to him, he will run the risk of losing objectivity in the rest of his observation. He knows that if he comes too quickly to a judgment, he will miss much of the evidence against it and pay more attention to the elements that are in its favor. And he knows how strong the pull to act according to a prejudgment will be.

  And so he chooses to be selective with those elements that he allows inside his head to begin with. That means with both the furniture that exists already and the potential furniture that is vying to get past the hippocampal gateway and make its way into long-term storage. For we should never forget that any experience, any aspect of the world to which we bring our attention is a future memory ready to be made, a new piece of furniture, a new picture to be added to the file, a new element to fit in to our already crowded attics. We can’t stop our minds from forming basic judgments. We can’t control every piece of information that we retain. But we can know more about the filters that generally guard our attic’s entrance and use our motivation to attend more to the things that matter for our goals—and give less weight to those that don’t.

  Holmes is not an automaton, as the hurt Watson calls him when he fails to share his enthusiasm for Mary. (He, too, will one day call a woman remarkable—Irene Adler. But only after she has bested him in a battle of wits, showing herself to be a more formidable opponent, male or female, than he has ever encountered.) He simply understands that everything is part of a package and could just as well stem from character as from circumstance, irrespective of valence—and he knows that attic space is precious and that we should think carefully about what we add to the boxes that line our minds.
br />   Let’s go back to Joe or Jane Stranger. How might the encounter have played out differently had we taken Holmes’s approach as a guide? You see Joe’s baseball hat or Jane’s blue streak, the associations—positive or negative as they may be—come tumbling out. You’re feeling like this is the person you do or do not want to spend some time getting to know . . . but before our Stranger opens his mouth, you take just a moment to step back from yourself. Or rather, step more into yourself. Realize that the judgments in your head had to come from somewhere—they always do—and take another look at the person who is making his way toward you. Objectively, is there anything on which to base your sudden impression? Does Joe have a scowl? Did Jane just push someone out of the way? No? Then your dislike is coming from somewhere else. Maybe if you reflect for just a second, you will realize that it is the baseball hat or the blue streak. Maybe you won’t. In either case, you will have acknowledged, first off, that you have already predisposed yourself to either like or dislike someone you haven’t even met; and second, that you have admitted that you must correct your impression. Who knows, it might have been right. But at least if you reach it a second time, it will be based on objective facts and will come after you’ve given Joe or Jane a chance to talk. Now you can use the conversation to actually observe—physical details, mannerisms, words. A wealth of evidence that you will treat with the full knowledge that you have already decided, on some level and at some earlier point, to lend more weight to some signs than to others, which you will try to reweigh accordingly.

  Maybe Jane is nothing like your friend. Maybe even though you and Joe don’t share the same love of baseball, he is actually someone you’d want to get to know. Or maybe you were right all along. The end result isn’t as important as whether or not you stopped to recognize that no judgment—no matter how positive or negative, how convincing or seemingly untouchable—begins with an altogether blank slate. Instead, by the time a judgment reaches our awareness, it has already been filtered thoroughly by the interaction of our brain attics and the environment. We can’t consciously force ourselves to stop these judgments from forming, but we can learn to understand our attics, their quirks, tendencies, and idiosyncrasies, and to try our best to set the starting point back to a more neutral one, be it in judging a person or observing a situation or making a choice.

  A Prime Environment: The Power of the Incidental

  In the case of Mary Morstan or Joe and Jane Stranger, elements of physical appearance activated our biases, and these elements were an intrinsic part of the situation. Sometimes, however, our biases are activated by factors that are entirely unrelated to what we are doing—and these elements are sneaky little fellows. Even though they may be completely outside our awareness—in fact, often for that very reason—and wholly irrelevant to whatever it is we’re doing, they can easily and profoundly affect our judgment.

  At every step, the environment primes us. In the “Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” Watson and Holmes are aboard a train to the country. As they pass Aldershot, Watson glances out the window at the passing houses.

  “Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.

  But Holmes shook his head gravely.

  “Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

  Holmes and Watson may indeed be looking at the same houses, but what they see is altogether different. Even if Watson manages to acquire all of Holmes’s skill in observation, that initial experience will still necessarily differ. For, not only are Watson’s memories and habits wholly distinct from Holmes’s, but so, too, are the environmental triggers that catch his eye and set his mind thinking along a certain road.

  Long before Watson exclaims at the beauty of the passing houses, his mind has been primed by its environment to think in a certain way and to notice certain things. While he is still sitting silently in the train car, he notes the appeal of the scenery, an “ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with fleecy white clouds drifting from west to east.” The sun is shining brightly, but there’s “an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man’s energy.” And there, in the middle of the new, bright spring leaves, are the houses. Is it all that surprising, then, that Watson sees his world bathed in a pink, happy glow? The pleasantness of his immediate surroundings is priming him to be in a positive mindset.

  But that mindset, as it happens, is altogether extraneous in forming other judgments. The houses would remain the same even if Watson were sad and depressed; only his perception of them would likely shift. (Might they not then appear lonely and gloomy?) In this particular case, it little matters whether Watson perceives the houses as friendly or not. But what if, say, he were forming his judgment as a prelude to approaching one of them, be it to ask to use a phone or to conduct a survey or to investigate a crime? Suddenly, how safe the houses are matters a great deal. Do you really want to knock on a door by yourself if there’s a chance that the occupants living behind that door are sinister and apt to commit crime with impunity? Your judgment of the house had better be correct—and not the result of a sunny day. Just as we need to know that our internal attics affect our judgment outside of our awareness, so, too, must we be aware of the impact that the external world has on those judgments. Just because something isn’t in our attic doesn’t mean that it can’t influence our attic’s filters in very real ways.

  There is no such thing as the “objective” environment. There is only our perception of it, a perception that depends in part on habitual ways of thinking (Watson’s disposition) and in part on the immediate circumstances (the sunny day). But it’s tough for us to realize the extent of the influence that our attic’s filters have on our interpretation of the world. When it comes to giving in to the ideal spring day, unprepared Watson is hardly alone—and should hardly be blamed for his reaction. Weather is an extremely powerful prime, one that affects us regularly even though we may have little idea of its impact. On sunny days, to take one example, people report themselves to be happier and to have higher overall life satisfaction than on rainy days. And they have no awareness at all of the connection—they genuinely believe themselves to be more fulfilled as individuals when they see the sun shining in a light blue sky, not unlike the one that Watson sees from his carriage window.

  The effect goes beyond simple self-report and plays out in decisions that matter a great deal. On rainy days, students looking at potential colleges pay more attention to academics than they do on sunny days—and for every standard deviation increase in cloud cover on the day of the college visit, a student is 9 percent more likely to actually enroll in that college. When the weather turns gray, financial traders are more likely to make risk-averse decisions; enter the sun, risk-seeking choice increases. The weather does much more than set a pretty scene. It directly impacts what we see, what we focus on, and how we evaluate the world. But do you really want to base a college choice, a judgment of your overall happiness (I’d be curious to see if more divorces or breakups were initiated on rainy days than on sunny days), or a business decision on the state of the atmosphere?

  Holmes, on the other hand, is oblivious to the weather—he has been engrossed in his newspaper for the entire train ride. Or rather, he isn’t entirely oblivious, but he realizes the importance of focused attention and chooses to ignore the day, much as he had dismissed Mary’s attractiveness with an “I haven’t noticed.” Of course he notices. The question is whether or not he then chooses to attend, to pay attention—and let his attic’s contents change in any way as a result. Who knows how the sun would have affected him had he not had a case on his mind and allowed his awareness to wander, but as i
t is, he focuses on entirely different details and a wholly different context. Unlike Watson, he is understandably anxious and preoccupied. After all, he has just been summoned by a young woman who stated that she had come to her wit’s end. He is brooding. He is entirely consumed by the puzzle that he is about to encounter. Is it any surprise then that he sees in the houses a reminder of just the situation that has been preoccupying his mind? It may not be as incidental a prime as the weather has been for Watson, but it is a prime nevertheless.

  But, you may (correctly) argue, hasn’t Watson been exposed to the exact same telegram by the troubled client? Indeed he has. But for him that matter is far from mind. That’s the thing about primes: the way it primes you and the way it primes me may not be the same. Recall the earlier discussion of our internal attic structure, our habitual biases and modes of thought. Those habitual thought patterns have to interact with the environment for the full effect of subtle, preconscious influences on our thought process to take hold; and it is they that largely impact what we notice and how that element then works its way through our minds.